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Click. Post. Gone? What Is Your Digital Legacy?

• Pat Benincasa • Episode 121

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Got emails? A blog? Social media? A website? Then you’ve got a digital trail—but what happens to it when you’re gone?

In this eye-opening episode, Len Rosen—futurist, tech writer, and founder of the site 21stCenTech —asks the questions we avoid:  What happens to your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Apple, and Google accounts? Who has access? Who decides? What just… disappears?  From rented movies and dusty blogs to forgotten passwords and digital ghosts, Len breaks it down with sharp insight and dry wit.

Click. Post. Gone. What stays, what vanishes—and who gets to decide?

🌟 Bonus: Download the free Digital Legacy Starter Sheet (link in show notes). Because someday, someone you love will be glad you did.    

Links:

21stCenTech.com

Digital Legacy Starter Sheet PDF

Today's episode is brought to you by the Joan of Arc Scroll Medal, a beautiful brass alloy medal, designed by award-winning artist, Pat Benincasa. This uniquely shaped medal is ideal for holiday or as a special occasion gift!    Visit www.patbenincasa-art.com

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Please Note: The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcaster.

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Pat:

Fill To Capacity where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.

Pat:

Hi, I'm Pat Benincasa, and welcome to Fill To Capacity, Episode #121: "Click. Post. Gone. What Is Your Digital Legacy? Hey, before we get rolling, this isn't legal advice. It's just two curious minds trying to untangle the digital trail we leave behind. Okay, listeners, are you on social media? Do you have emails? Have you ever written a blog about a family trip or a wedding? Do you have a website? Are you a writer, artist, photographer, or maybe even podcaster? Okay, if so, you've already created something that lives in the digital world, but what happens to all of that? Your emails, your posts, your creative digital work after you're gone? Well, welcome to the world of digital legacy, the part of your life that doesn't live in your home, but online. It builds itself post by post, click by click. And today's guest, Len Rosen, saw this coming before most of us knew it was a thing.

Pat:

He has an amazing journey, and it's what caught my attention. He holds a degree in Islamic studies and medieval history from University of Toronto. His thesis looked at the power shifts between empires at the edge of collapse. After that, he moved into high tech consulting and spent decades with early stage tech companies. Now, Len is the creator and publisher of 21stcentech.com, a science and technology blog where he explores the breakthroughs, the blind spots, and moral crossroads of our modern world. He's also tackling something people might be putting off, or they don't even think about naming a digital executor in his will, because this isn't just theory, it's personal for all of us, the digital trail we leave behind grows every day. We plan for our physical assets, homes, bank accounts, heirlooms. But what about our digital assets? Maybe it's time to decide what stays, what goes, and who gets to decide. So welcome Len Rosen, glad you're here to shed a little light on this thing called Digital Legacy.

Len:

Well, thank you for having me, pat. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this subject because it's very close to my heart at this moment. My wife and I are in the process of getting new wills drafted, and boy, oh boy, it's been an interesting experience talking to a new lawyer whose mouth dropped when I said, we need a digital executor. And she said, why?

Pat:

Before you go into that, I'm curious, I wanna ask you about your remarkable website, 21stcentech.com I mean, you've been writing about science and tech and the future for over 15 years. Why did you start it? What drives this?

Len:

When I was a little boy, I was eight years old, my father brought home a book and he gave it to me called The Boy Scientist. And that read book got read and read and read and read. And I would go and do the experiments and I would do the, all the kinds of things that were in the book that I could then practice as, as if I were a scientist or a chemist or a physicist. And I would do everything, every one of the experiments when I was wandering around in the world of nature, I would be collecting specimens and bringing them back and doing all the things that the boy scientists did. So that was my world. And it's funny, I came back to that when I retired. I started writing the blog in my last year of still doing full work. And I remember saying this, this is going to be my legacy. This is going to be my opportunity to share my childhood fascination with science, nature, technology, the future, the science fiction side of me, and share that with people. And if they read it, great, if they don't read it, well, you know, it's my opportunity to just say it All that childhood fascination has become this senior citizen daily effort, and I appreciate doing it. It fills about half of my day every day.

Pat:

Day. I bet it does,

Len:

Because I do research and writing. Usually I have 14 or 15 articles in planning or writing stage. That's how I plan my day, and I make sure I get it all done before, well before I go to bed, because my wife would divorce me if I didn't.

Pat:

Okay, that's a pretty full day. Now, most people know they should have a will or an estate plan, and that's how you make sure your physical assets, home money, your belongings, your go, where you want them to go when you're gone. Now, people who don't know about this, you name an executor, someone you trust to carry out your wishes, close the accounts, pay the bills, and make sure everything gets handled the way you intend. But here's what's often missing and Len opened with this as well.

Pat:

What about your digital life, your emails, photos, blogs, websites, social media? Who handles that? And as Len mentioned, he asked his lawyer about a digital executor. And like many situations when you select a lawyer and you ask questions, when you ask the question, what about a digital executor? And they're surprised is very, very telling. Before we go any further, Len, what does a digital executor actually do and how is that different from a traditional executor?

Len:

Well, first of all, there's an executor in a will, and that executor in the will is responsible for the entire estate. Alright? They can nominate or we can pre nominate a digital executor. In the case of our family, my wife and I have chosen my son-in-law to be the digital executor. He is a web magazine writer. He knows the internet well. He understands the technology. My daughter will be the executor. Our bank will be the backup because you need a backup executor just in case something happens. And all of that has now been arranged. So what you look for in a digital executor is somebody who's very tech literate, somebody who knows about your digital life. And, uh, and that is the big exercise. The pre-planning of that exercise is really important for me. It, it, it's really quite simple. I mean, I have multiple social media sites.

Len:

I have sites that I don't even remember. I have, because I started investigating social media at the outset when it was first, it first arrived, there were 153 social media sites online. At one point, when Facebook first came out, it was just one of many. Google was sponsoring something called Orkut. And that was a, a social media site in Brazil with 82 million followers. Of course, I was on Orkut. because I wanted my stuff that I write to be read by people who speak Portuguese. What the heck? You know, it seemed to me like, why not try these things? So you have that. Then I originally had a blog on blogger. It was a small business tech blog, uh, because that supported my business practice as a, as a management consultant, and I could explore the ideas that I was sharing with my clients through that blog. I haven't looked at that blog in years. It's somewhere out there in the ether. And at some point I guess I should try and find it. And because of you, I have the tools to go look.

Pat:

And we're gonna be talking about that.

Len:

Because that wasn't the tool I knew anything about until you sent me a list of, uh, of stuff that you wanted us to talk about today. Well, I've already started exploring that and that that'll become part of the digital legacy. Then of course, there's the blog site, uh, 21stcentech.com is the 21st Century Tech blog. That's what, that's what I call it. And the 21stcentech.com blog has over 4,400 articles in it. That's a lot of content.

Pat:

Yeah.

Len:

And that content is relevant even today. Most of it is relevant today. So sure, some of it is, has been surpassed by new inventions, new technologies, and the subject matter goes everything from agriculture to urban planning, from astronomy to space science and space exploration. The, the coverage is social coverage. A lot of futurology, a lot of looking at what I believe is going to happen going out 200, 300 years even into the future, which a lot of people never even think about. But this, this is me. That's who I am.

Pat:

I gotta say Len, when I went on that site, I was blown away. I'm looking at introducing a robot that listens to plants. I'm thinking, whoa, and your stories from carbon capture. I mean, you just have a range of different topics. It's really an exciting site. And I will put that link in the show notes for people. Oh, thank

Len:

You very much. I want people to read it. I have over 70,000 people who have subscribed to the blog site, over the 15 years. So multiple millions of pages have been read. I I get the data all the time and I'm looking at it and I'm going, how did this happen? This is a childhood love and interest that has blossomed into a fascination in my old age,

Pat:

Yeah. But you know, you're just bringing up an interesting point with your background and what you've been tracking. You have lived through generations of text shifts from handwritten letters to AI generated content to bots. Now, we used to leave behind boxes of photos and letters. Now it's terabytes in a cloud. But here's the twist. Most of what we think we own music, books, movies are really just licensed. So with so much of our digital life made up of rented content, streaming subscriptions, platforms we don't control can. That's right. Can we actually shape what stays and what goes? Do we really have any say? Can that be part of our legacy?

Len:

Well, there are copyright laws, and if you copyright the things that you put on the web that does give you some level of protection, I, uh, compose music as a hobby. Alright? So when I write a piece of music and I, I create a manuscript of the music, I copyright it. The way I copyright it is simple copyright. I just mail it to myself in an envelope. So, and I don't open the envelope. That's one way of protecting yourself. It's a simple way. But there are obviously other ways to do this. You can copyright using a lawyer. You can copyright using normal patent processes.

Pat:

You are talking about intellectual property. I'm talking about I stream and purchase music on Apple. I go to Amazon and I download movies that I thought I bought, but all that stuff I haven't bought. So what do people do with all that?

Len:

If they don't have somebody looking after it, after their past? It just becomes, uh, more detritus on the cloud. Part of one of the, the challenges of the 21st century is managing people's expectations of what is important to them and what is not important to them. And essential, my wife and I have gone through three or four downsizings. We owned a house back in 2012. Our daughter was gonna be getting married. We decided to sell the house. So that was our first big downsize. We moved into an apartment downtown in Toronto. Then we said, well, after two years, this is too big for us. We went to another apartment with a little smaller that meant more downsizing. I had over 6,000 books in my library in our house. I'm down to about 300 now that are books that I cherish, and the rest has now been given away, sold, whatever. When we were moving from our house, I had a yard sale and I lined the garage with bookcases and shelves, and I put the books in and I gave everybody boxes. And I said, fill a box. 10 bucks, fill a box, 25 bucks, depending on the size of the box. So people hauled away tons of books. And it was wonderful because the burden of hanging onto this stuff was starting to become overwhelming.

Pat:

No, I understand. I've done a similar thing. I had thousands of books, and as you say, I'm down to a couple hundred and those are the books I can't let go of. I I just can't.

Len:

Yeah. So that's the way I feel. Here's the interesting part. I'm writing a blog and it's about glaciation and isostatic rebound and what's happening as alpine glaciers melt and as a polar ice caps melt and, and Antarctic ice sheets melt, the continents rise the land underneath rises. For instance, you may not know this, but if you live in Maryland, your part of the continent is actually dipping downward because if you live in Toronto, it's moving up. So we're still responding to the end of the last ice age 20,000 to 12,000 years ago. And the continent is still rising. And what it's doing is it's tipping Maryland downward. So as ocean levels, sea levels rise, Maryland's is accelerated because they're also tipping downward. So that means more flooding on those coasts. But here I am looking for my book, uh, Flint's Glacial and Pleistocene Geology, and I said, oh no, I gave it away. But I still remember, I still remember what I read when I read that book, A draw on the knowledge that I had retained.

Pat:

Now I wanna get into the nitty gritty because this is what most people don't know. What actually happens when someone passes away and still has active accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, apple, Google, X or Threads. Do these companies treat death the same way? Or are there big differences in how they handle user legacy deletion or memorial?

Len:

They don't treat it the same way. That's something you should know right away. Generally speaking, they're all following the same kind of rule set. Google has a very specific approach. It's called the inactive account manager. So if they notice that you're not using your Gmail for several months, and you have activated the inactive account manager, you've specified within Google that you have understand this, then what'll happen is they'll start sending a message to the person you've designated as your executor of the Google account.

Pat:

But what if you didn't do an executor?

Len:

Well, if you didn't, if you don't have a named person that's a contact, then they have nothing to send. And so what will happen is they'll either inactivate the account and make it just invisible, or they'll transfer it to the cloud and and hold it until they hear it from someone.

Pat:

Is there a timeframe on that? Like if they don't hear from you in a year or two years?

Len:

Not that I know, I've not explored that extent. Apple does the same kind of thing. They, they have what's called the legacy contact, and you can deal with apple's ID and the iCloud and all that stuff using that service. Facebook, they memorialize accounts or delete them, and you have to give them a death certificate. The same is true for LinkedIn. For X, you have to give them a death certificate for them to deal with resolving your account. I'm also on BlueSky. And blue sky of course is a recent phenomenon because of X and, BlueSky doesn't have an official policy at all. Really. It's

Len:

It's not. I've made inquiries. I've asked, they have a process that they recommend that is send us an email to deactivate your account. Okay? But if you're dead, that means that your executor has to send the email and then they want to know what your BlueSky handle is. They want to know proof that you know who this person is. So they're not necessarily asking for proof of death or proof of relationship, but they are working towards that. Now, that isn't the same for an old one. Tumblr.

Pat:

That's an oldie.

Len:

Yeah. Tumblr just says, gimme the deceased full name and the name of the account.

Pat:

How about Threads?

Len:

I stopped using Threads.

Pat:

May I ask why?

Len:

I found it redundant? It's interesting. There's, there's just too many things to, to manage. I have a Reddit account. I don't use it very much. And because Reddit is organized in a different kind of way, when I don't post, sometimes it won't allow me to post. I don't know what the rules are. I engagement, it stops a post from happening. So I'd rather not have to deal with that minutia. Yeah. Uh, and, and then just go on with it. There's another site that I use called Mastodon. Mastodon is a social media site. And they have a procedure saying, give us the deceased user's account and contact our administrator and provide the accounts full handle and the proof of death. Most of them work that way. I've been looking at this in greater depth because I've suddenly realized I have all of these legacy ones that I haven't looked at in years, and I'm gonna have to deal with those as well. The big exercise is creating a single file that's encrypted with all of this information in it and giving a password, password protected. And that can be accessed by the person who is your digital executor at the time of your death. And that person knows that file exists, that person knows how to get to it, and that person executes it upon your death,

Pat:

Funny, you should mention that I was gonna wait till the end of the podcast to mention this for folks wondering how to start that list. I put together a simple "Digital Legacy Starter Sheet." It's a PDF. And what I did, I had to do that because I was explaining to a Len off air that as an artist and podcaster with websites, I've been researching this for a couple years, but this starter sheet gives you steps to organize all of your digital assets. And I'm gonna put a link to that. It's free. You can go download it and I hope it helps. And I'll share what I did because I had to figure out, like Len is talking about, I had to organize this 'cause we're all over the place. So I listed every email address, subscription website, podcast platforms, blog, social media account that I have. And next to each one I have login details, password, I even have the credit card I used for it and what I want done with it. So again, that list will be made available when I post in the show notes. And as Len says, this is very important, the, the executor to my estate who's digitally savvy, will have that list and they'll know what to do with it. And it gives me peace of mind. So, Len, II'm glad you you're bringing this up.

Len:

Yeah. It, for me was the, the first step in beginning to understand my digital legacy. I mean, I do all my banking online. Uh, you know, and because I have a relationship with kiva.org, the, the company that does micro loans in the developing world, I use money I earned from the blog to actually invest in developing world micro loans. So PayPal is my online bank. At any one time, there could be 500 or $600 in my PayPal account that I constantly am rolling over into loans in the, in the developing world. I have 140 or 150 loans right now that are active loans, uh, to people in 43 countries. And those loans are raising all boats. That's the whole idea. This is people take a pooled capital of loan, small loans from micro lenders, and they can do projects. And those projects can be anywhere from buying seed for a farm to buying a a second tuk-tuk for their taxi service in India. And so you're helping these people get a life. You're helping these people raise a family. You're helping these people have their children educated and improving their world. And so for me, that the blog has, has become an outlet for, for me to, to do non charitable, no interest bearing investment. You know 99% of the loans get paid back.

Pat:

What a great way to use your money.

Len:

Three out of the hundreds have defaulted. That's it for me, that that's part of this legacy. So when I'm dealing with the legacy of, of my estate, my digital legacy includes 143 people that I've invested in, in 43 countries. You gotta track it all.

Pat:

Yeah, you do. Okay. So we have listeners following this conversation. And maybe out there, there's a listener saying, whoa, I have emails. I'm on Facebook, maybe Instagram and what they're talking about. I don't know any, I mean, how will I find a digital executor? How am I supposed to do that? Any tips for people?

Len:

Well, the key here is somebody who's, who's tech savvy. If they're tech savvy, they can help you. If they're not, it, it's just creating more problems. When I was looking at what a digital legacy and a digital executor should be, for me, the key was tech literacy. They understand, they know how to close, they know how to transfer. They know how to deal with online accounts. They've done it themselves. So they, they're familiar enough. They don't really need to know the law that much. It's different in Canada from the United States. For instance, in the United States, you have the fiduciary access to Digital Assets Act, which, um, gives executors limited authority over digital property. And in Canada, there isn't a federal law, uh, that explicitly covers this at all. In the, in the, um, European Union, there is a similar law to the American law. And so you have to look, if you're dealing with assets that, that are overseas, if you're dealing with assets in the eu, if you're dealing with assets that you've developed in Canada, you have to know what the laws are. And you need to know that your tech digital executor is familiar enough to, to know that you've given them background to be able to execute on their, on your death.

Pat:

You know, my dad always had a saying, your doctor or lawyer is only as good as the information you give them.

Len:

Yeah.

Pat:

People who are thinking about finding a digital executor, as Len is pointing out, they're only gonna be as good as the information you give to them. And the second thing, Len, I have international listeners, so I really appreciate the scope of what you just said internationally for those listeners.

Len:

Yeah. I would think that digital legacies are probably not well thought through in a lot of countries around the world. Because this, this is just not where their headspace is, but it's coming and AI is changing it as well. So AI is making this even more complicated. And in another sense, it's also making it simpler. For instance, when I first started writing about this, I was using Monica, which is, uh, an AI from Microsoft. Monica was a sort of a precursor to what Microsoft uses now. And what was interesting with Monica is I asked it a question. I said, look, if I'm gonna die, what do I have to do about managing my digital assets? And, and Monica said, sorry to hear that you're dying. Uh, when I asked it more specific questions, it says, we don't feel comfortable in responding to this. We were concerned about your health, and if you would like to ask more specific questions related to that, we would be happy to respond. It, it was really hilarious. In effect, much of what I have learned, uh, has come from me asking questions of Perplexity.

Pat:

Oh Perplexity is great. It's an AI platform that really goes in depth.

Len:

Well, what I like about Perplexity is, is just simply that I see the thought process behind the response, and I get all the citations and links for where they drew the, uh, the information. I don't get that with chat GBT. And that's always what bothered me from when I started using chat GBT as a, as a test. I've been testing ais now since that first chat, GBT 2.0 came out. And, um, wondering what was gonna happen with this technology. Uh, that's an aside that we can go into at another time. If you wanna have another discussion in the future,

Pat:

We may have, I may have to have you back because, uh, AI is the raging discussion. I'm a user of Chat GBT. In fact, I even call her Chatty G.And so when I use Chatty, I always ask, is this original? Where are the sources? Where are you getting this from? Oh, Pat, thank you for asking. And then she'll give me them.

Len:

That's a better approach to an AI than most people take. So when, when you are dealing with ai, the first thing you should always do is, is form the question. When I work with Perplexity, I say, okay, here's the question I'm asking you now. Provide me with the background information on where you cited what sources you're using and the arguments for your conclusions. And that guidance, it gives you a very precise answer that meets whatever you're trying to do your research on. I use that as background research for the articles I write. So if I'm looking for sources, I and I question's come into my head, I start with that. And from there on everything else I write need for me to use their prose. I don't use their prose. I use mine. And I do a drill down on their citations and sources. And then I go and look at the links to those in those sources. 'cause some sources are phony.

Pat:

You mentioned early on about the digital things. We forget old forums, old accounts that we abandoned years ago. And that brings me to something that's called the Internet Archive. Yes. And this thing called the Wayback Machine. Would you like to talk about that?

Len:

Well, you know, you got me really quite interested in that when I saw that in your, in your list of things that we were going to talk about today. First of all, the internet archive. I have now joined, uh, the University of Toronto's internet archive because of you. And the internet archive is really, uh, an interesting library of content on the web. And it covers an enormous amount. Yes. Content, all stuff that is historical stuff that is, it's just brilliant. And so I'm gonna be writing about that very shortly. And the other one, of course, is the Wayback machine, which is part of the internet archive. It's a library of content. It's amazing. I can go in and find sites that I forgot I had by doing a, a deep down search in, in the Wayback machine. And that'll help me, by the way, in getting that final document done. Drafted for the lawyer.

Pat:

Just to recap, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library that offers free public access to a vast collection of digitized materials, including websites, books, audio, video, images, and software. And the Wayback Machine lets users view archived versions of websites as they appeared at different points in time. The internet archives mission is to preserve digital history and provide universal access to all knowledge.

Len:

Do you remember MySpace?

Pat:

Oh, sure.

Len:

Is MySpace still active? Don't know.

Len:

You know, I don't think it is. But I have a legacy in MySpace. That was the first social network I ever went on. It was the first one I signed up for. So I, I've gotta find out what I don't know about myself that's still out there in the ethernet. It's a strange feeling to know that you have traces of yourself all over the web.

Pat:

Yes.

Len:

And I don't want my wife to have to deal with the headache of this. She doesn't enjoy technology very much. She has mastered email and she's mastered a few things that she likes and the rest of it and texting. But the rest of it forget. And I don't blame her because quite honestly, I get on a train going into Toronto 'cause the Go Train service into Toronto. I don't have to drive. And you sit in a cabin in which almost everybody is looking at a small screen.

Pat:

Yeah.

Len:

They're cocooned in this environment that we've created, uh, that is antisocial. And yet it's social online, but it's antisocial and direct presence. And it really bothers me because I don't see this as a very encouraging future for people if they are so caught up in, uh, the technology that they don't lift their heads up and look around and engage other people.

Pat:

You know, I look at that and I call it "portable isolation." We carry it in our pocket or in our purse. And a as you say, you go into a restaurant, a group of people are together and they're on their phones. Or coffee shop. It's pulling us away from social interaction.

Len:

When texting first came up, it started in Asia. It started in Korea and Japan. And people would text each other sitting in a bus right next to each other. They wouldn't talk. They would text. Yeah. And I'm going, really, it's the art of conversation no longer considered necessary. Everything's short form. I use acronym for words. I've written 12 step article on how to disengage from small screens and digital addiction. 'cause I think that that's a necessary exercise to begin to recognize you have an addiction and that you need to manage it. And if you can't manage it, it just sucks you in. I don't know if you know, but there are lawsuits now going on against Google and Facebook and Meta and X and a few other, uh, the very big players that are about this issue, about how they have created addictive environments that are impacting children negatively. I mean, state lawsuits in the United States, here in Canada, in Europe, we are coming to a point where we have to make some better decisions about how we use digital technology.

Pat:

Another aspect to that, as we've become more modern, just looking at radio, there was a time when radio stations, it was a community thing. If you were growing up and you heard the latest rock and roll friends, everybody be talking about it. Radio was a community binder. And same with TV At one time, everybody watching the last show of mash, millions of people, it was a community thing that everybody felt, well, we don't have radio. Everybody has privatized music. Their lists, their streaming. They have privatized conversations, you know, in this little thing that they carry around. When I was teaching art, I set up a still life. And when students came in and said, okay, we're gonna, you know, start with the still life. There were half the kids took out their phones and photographed the still life. I gassed mentally I thought, oh my God, I wasn't trying to judge it. I felt like Margaret Meade on Planet Digital, these kids were photographing it.

Len:

But can you imagine, were they gonna render the art after, because it now had become 2D because it was in a photograph. Uh, whereas they could not perceive depth in a three dimensional object. I mean, it's really interesting because yeah, that's a common problem. And we're seeing more and more of it. And I feel for it. I feel for young people who have not learned how to live their lives in a way that engages the world. Engaging the world through a small screen is not engaging the world

Pat:

Well, you're either participating or you're observing. And it's training us to be observers more than participants.

Len:

Yeah. And it's also making us nastier the anonymity of digital presence. I get people responding to articles I write, and they write pure hate. First of all, they, they don't accept the science. You know, if you, if you write about mRNA vaccines and you explain to people how this technology was developed, I was writing about mRNA technology 12 years ago.

Pat:

Len, what is that technology?

Len:

MRNA. It's the technology that encapsulates a segment of DNA or RNA that can be used to cure or prevent an illness. All right. It's always been interesting to me to find that they don't understand the science of, they don't understand it immediately. It becomes something they fear. Yeah. And if they fear it, then they find reasons to block it, not want to do it, and not want to learn about it. So I get people who've written to me about 5G and the future of six G.

Pat:

Okay. I'm gonna jump in here and say 5G is the current generation of wireless technology used in mobile networks. It offers faster speeds, lower latency, and the ability to connect more devices at one time compared to 4G. And it powers things like HD streaming, smart cities, self-driving cars, and real-time communication. Six G is the future of wireless tech expected to launch around 2030. It aims to deliver even faster data rates. Lets people see 3D holograms in real time control devices with their thoughts, brain and computer links well for medicine and prosthetics, and create digital worlds that feel almost real supercharged virtual reality. Back to Len

Len:

Saying, isn't this all gonna cause brain cancer? And I say, verify and cite your sources for that thinking because I'd like to understand it better. And they quote the RFK juniors of the world, the pseudoscience of, uh, rumor mills and, uh, and internet, uh, garbage commonly found. So you have to understand some basic things to understand why this isn't a threat or why it is a threat. And this latest thing about not using mRNA based vaccines by RFK Junior for the United States, uh, health and human services is absolutely absurd notion. I mean, this is so dumb. It defies dumbness. People will die. People will die because of these decisions being made. You had mentioned in a note to me a few days ago, what made me start thinking about a digital footprint. My answer to that was COVID. When I got COVID, it almost killed me.

Len:

It infected my heart. I had to have two heart procedures. I ended up also having to have vascular surgery to repair damage. And I'm now on lifetime blood thinners because of a disease that some people think is a joke. But it almost killed me. That made me realize that my mortality was at stake. And that if I, if I'm going to pass, then I better have everything in order. And that's what really got me starting down this path. So my digital footprint had to be in order as well. That's how all of this started, and that's how I started writing about this subject.

Pat:

Boy, that's quite a story. You know, as we get to the top of the hour and wrap up, I wanna ask you, what do you think is the most meaningful part of a person's digital legacy? What's worth preserving?

Len:

The things that, to me, that are worth preserving are ideas. When you write about something and it's something profound and it's something new and it's meaningful to you, it's, it should be meaningful in a way that you want to preserve it. I love what I write. I love the exercise of, of, um, exploring each day the world, a world sometimes that I know nothing about. Quickly educate myself. And then I begin to realize I wanna share this with people. I wanna share this wonderment with others who will find it equally interesting. I mean, there'll be, people will say, I don't need to read this. I I want people to experience what I experienced when I was a little boy. When I first turned over a rock and found, uh, an insect underneath it or a worm. You know, I have a degree in history.

Len:

And I always said that the reason I took history is because history made. I was studying everything because history, uh, it begins to give you a sense of everything that's happening in the world from a human perspective. You studied art, you studied music, you studied culture, you studied literature. It wasn't that dates and events and names and kings and queens. That wasn't the history I studied when I was in university. Climate change was never mentioned in history. Now, when I do my research and write a story about history, climate change is at the forefront Yeah. Of my thinking as I look at what caused migrations of, of tribes from Central Asia into the Roman Empire. What was the forces behind that? Why did the Mongol Empire spread the way it did? The, the interesting about the rise of Islam. Islam comes out of the desert because of a hundred year war between one empire and another empire. And they end up absolutely destroying each other in the process. And who fills the vacuum? Islam.

Pat:

We have climate refugees today. I did a podcast about that about two years ago. We have shifting migrations of people. We have climate change refugees now.

Len:

Yeah, we do. And we're gonna see more if you look at the Pacific Islands, that they're, they're probably the best, uh, harbinger of, of a future that many are gonna feel. And that is countries like Tuvalu are buying property in Fiji. And the reason why to move all their citizens there, because Tuvalu is gonna be underwater in another 50 years. It's a low, a toll island chain. And the Pacific Ocean is rising and they're already experiencing floods. They're already experiencing the submerging of their fields and their property, and, and they're watching these, these events. So the government of Tulo has bought property in Fiji, Australia is becoming a refuge for Pacific Islanders. . New Zealand is becoming a refuge for Pacific Island nations that need a place for their people. After those islands disappear, we look at climate change and we think, well, yeah, it's causing homes to topple in the Eastern Seaboard into the ocean. You haven't looked at what's happening in, in the Delmarva Peninsula, then you, you're not paying much attention to what climate change is wreaking coastal America. But it's certainly doing, its a number. You can't ignore these things.

Pat:

No. And as you talk about the meaningful part of a person's digital legacy, I couldn't help but think what you are really saying that we live in, the stories we tell and the stories we carry forward. Len, I wanna thank you for bringing your, your clarity, your history, your expertise to this conversation. And I think you made it understandable and practical. And I wanna thank you for coming on Fill To Capacity and reminding us that even in a world of rented content and forgotten logins, we can still shape what we leave behind. Thank you.

Len:

Uh, thank you for having me. I appreciated the conversation.

Pat:

Oh, and listeners, remember the Digital Legacy Starter Sheet, PDF is available. It's in the show notes. It's free. And thank you listeners for joining us. Take care. Bye.

 

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Pat Benincasa

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